I Court the Machine: A Ring, Facebook, And Step Away: A Brick and a Walk

The Ring

We need to get you something for Christmas,” Bruce said. Christmas gifts can be difficult here. “I’d like to get you an Oura ring.” He’d seen the slick television ads promoting them for better health, and a close friend has spoken highly about hers.

But I hesitated because it sets a machine between me and my body. Do I want to invite a machine that far into my personal, physical space? The ring gathers data on my sleep, my heart rate, how much I exercise by reading an artery in my index finger.

Somewhere there is a data center that uses electricity and water that allows the ring to speak. Do I want to be part of what might rob a community of their water and electricity? Do I want my health reduced to ones and zeroes, swimming with others’ health data? Will my breathing issues, or heart rate or blood pressure or lack of exercise be used against me one day?

A priest friend said, “Because it’s a gift, you might accept it.”

So I did.

Poor sleep has wrecked my days for years and a CPAP doesn’t do much. Every morning, I look at my sleep stages: an hour of REM, an hour of deep sleep. It tells me I’ve slept well enough. You know how a positive word can help you feel better? That’s how it’s working for me. In the evening, I’m turning off that other machine, my phone, and reading a book. My sleep is not so disturbed.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.¹

Since I’ve had the Oura ring for some months, it has helped me understand what’s going on with my sleep. It has caught those mini wake ups that I’m not conscious of and that explain why I feel so tired when I walk through my day. I take comfort in the chart showing when I’ve dropped into deep sleep, light sleep and dream sleep. When I’ve awakened from a dream, I can see where it shows up. It tips me off to when I’m feeling stressed out. If my heart rate and temperature are up, the dutiful AI like a helpful mother suggests I take it easy.

But I take seriously Paul Kingsnorth’s warning about machines.

“If a machine is the metaphor you use to represent other living beings, then a machine is what you’ll make of the world. When you have made a machine of the world, you are going to have a question on your hands: What fuel does this thing run on? And very soon you are going to understand the answer before you even asked it: The fuel is nature. The fuel is life. The fuel is you…The end point of that worldview is not simply the age of climate change and mass extinction—though it is that—but the abolition of human nature itself. An ideology built on remaking nature for human needs will inevitably include human nature in that project. Humanity can no more survive the mechanistic or scientific revolutions intact than can the forests or the oceans.²

Facebook and Screen Addiction

I’ve heard it said, “Your phone is a demon, social media is a vampire.” Sometimes I think it’s possessed, opening apps I don’t mean it to open, sometimes even my wallet. We all know how our phones listen to us. Lately, I’ve complained about sore hips. Alarming ads have cluttered my newsfeed stating how menopausal women’s tendons fray, but of course you can purchase this supplement to solve that.

But is there a kind of yin and yang principle at work with our phones, with social media? Are there angels in the machine as well as demons? 

Facebook helped me learn how to have an audience. Up until Facebook I’d been afraid of my people reading my work. I often paused for awhile before I posted a description of life on the farm.

Through Facebook I’ve found I can speak up without being shut down or ignored or insulted. I even dipped my comments in political discussions but soon found out I don’t have a mind for them nor do I feel like being drawn back to the comment thread day after day.  

My early statuses were prose poems, kind of like a hay baler where I packed in raked up experience, jam it together in that many words, tie a knot on it and pop it into a status.

This tutelage from Facebook lead me to publish my novel The River Caught Sunlight and write blogs to attract readers. After some years I moved my audience to Substack, which maintains my mailing list and offers some nifty tools like recording audios. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you open these essays and read them. I am even more grateful to my paid subscribers who have financially supported my work.

But Facebook has turned sour for me.  I don’t want to be there. I took the app off my phone, but continue to use Messenger. But when I open Messenger there’s a Facebook icon. I can’t resist taking a peek. I can lose significant time, reading Facebook’s latest drama when my dogs need walking and my horse needs feeding.

Intelligent Change, a business that makes analogue organizers and gratitude journals, stated in their blog:

We are absorbing emotions constantly from news alerts, TikToks, and trending reels. From our group chats and the subtle changes in someone else’s tone. From scrolling through strangers’ heartbreak and hope in the same 30-second span. We’re emotionally overstimulated and emotionally exhausted.³

Too much screen reading—Facebook and Substack–have accentuated my attention deficit and stomped on my own thoughts because both are urging me to think other people’s thoughts and emotions. Unfortunately Substack has set up a Notes feed like Facebook that is just as distracting in order to help people build their audience. But I am already saturated with Substack subscriptions. While I very much enjoy texting with people, I have felt the pressure to respond right away, even if I’m eating dinner or cleaning the barn or writing. This way I can pick a time that works for me to catch up on news. 

Here’s what I wrote for Northern Public Radio about my screen addiction:

For the last decade I’ve been captured by screens, mostly the phone but TV too. While in the car the phone has filled me in on the latest political outrage but left me blinded to the young eagle flying across the front of the car, or the joyous clouds rolling across a clear blue sky. There are rough drafts of novels sitting in notebooks that might have found readers by now. A few extra minutes? I pick up my phone and pack someone else’s thoughts in my brain instead of my own.

Like people sitting together at restaurants heads down, engrossed in their phones, I’ve sat with my quiet husband, texting on Messenger with someone who wants my help. Now.

“Internet friends are not friends,” says a wise friend. She’s right. Online relationships are disembodied and ghostlike. I’ve lost time on people who move on when their drama passes, while Mrs. Horse waits in the barnyard.

Without the benefit of a person’s physical presence, we miss out on how it can heal or energize or even discourage us. Maybe instead of building online friendships, we need to put down our screens and meet in person. Maybe instead of reading our phones during breakfast, lunch and dinner we need to taste and savor our food. Maybe if a post stings us to outrage, it’s not worth disturbing our peace. Maybe instead of filling every last minute with something our phone says, we need to be bored. Maybe I should apply all these maybes to myself.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.⁴

The Brick

I wrote this back in the fall of 2025, though my addiction to screens has dogged me since I loaded Facebook onto my phone. To this end, I decided to get a Brick, a physical gizmo, that blocks social media sites until I turn them back on. Social media has been more powerful than my will power, even though I know it’s not healthy to spend so much time scrolling. Here’s what the makers say about it:

As two recent college graduates who’ve grown up with smartphones, we realized that more often than not, the distracting features win out. Whether at the library, the office, or dinner with family, these devices are constantly pulling us away from what matters…

Now you can decide which tools you’d like to keep with you, and then tap your Brick to ditch the rest for a bit. Because it’s a physical device, you’ll have no temptation to use the distractions until you come back to the Brick (whether that means across the room or across the city).⁴

So far it’s opened up space for my own thoughts. It’s helped me be more present to Bruce. I am hoping that I become less scatterbrained by giving my mind a rest. It’s easing me out of the habit of reading my phone while I eat. And I don’t have to respond to someone’s instant message instantly or while I want to read or get about my day. I can wait to be in a better frame of mind.. 

A Walk as Antidote

Paul Kingsnorth has said “Put the peace of your heart before everything.” I work at this, especially when I walk, but if I’ve made the mistake of reading Facebook first thing, my mind darts like swallows.

I’ve scrolled through news of someone’s dog hit by a car, commentary on the latest mass shooting, the latest crazy Illinois law, our politicians acting in their best interest, local weather, an author’s new novel, a friend’s son’s wedding. I click on a reel and see a bridge fail, plunging a horse and rider into a rushing river. Facebook washes my mind, so I can’t think straight. I am outraged and frightened. But still I look.

I’ve seen enough of the wickedness underpinning our country to know some disaster is billowing like a tornado warned storm. There’s an authoritarian noose wrapping around us. I fear it will take violence to snip it. Violence will be the response.

As I walk, I watch a reef of clouds off to the northwest tinged a faint mauve. I marvel at the color and turn east, the sun muted. Mr. Dog sniffs the wood chuck holes on the shoulder. Mrs. Dog walks along companionably. When I turn back toward home, I watch how the sun draws a line, lighting up fields miles away. A few pigeons lift off, their wings clacking. I watch the light draw closer, the fields changing color, brightening, until the light surrounds me, the dogs and the fields nearby.

I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective. ⁶

References

1 Katie Andraski. Perspective: What I’m Learning from A Ring. Northern Public Radio. January 23, 2026 https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-perspectives/2026-01-23/perspective-what-im-learning-from-a-ring

2 Paul Kingsnorth. Against the Machine. 69 – 70

3 Emotional Fatigue is Real and Here’s What to Do About it. Intelligent Change. https://www.intelligentchange.com/blogs/read/emotional-fatigue

4 Katie Andraski. Perspective: Too Much Screen Time. Northern Public Radio October 7, 20205 https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-perspectives/2025-10-07/perspective-too-much-screen-time

5 Brick Website. https://getbrick.com/pages/story

6 Katie Andraski. Perspective: Facebook and a Walk. Northern Public Radio. February 24, 2026

https://www.northernpublicradio.org/wnij-perspectives/2026-02-24/perspective-facebook-and-a-walk

 

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